Bubble Wrap Keeps This Dining Room Addition Perfectly Insulated

For years, Michael Ermann, an architecture professor at Virginia Tech, has been pursuing a way to meld transparency and insulation within a design. Having explored bubble wrap as one option to achieve this, he put the material to the test in the gut renovation of his brick colonial house in Blacksburg, Virginia.

The first step in the floating dining room addition was constructing "sandwich panels", which Ermann has named "Fiz." They work by layering UV-resistant bubble wrap—treated to handle sunlight breakdown and yellowing—between blankets of glass. These translucent panels serve as the dining room walls, "[providing] both a measure of daylight and a measure of insulation," Ermann explains. In contrast to the average window, Fiz retains heat, even on cold winter nights.